Basque Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
March 11th, 2008
We’ve just added a Basque translation of the Open Knowledge Definition - thanks to Gotzon Egia.
If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.
Following on from a spate of fresh translations of the Open Knowledge Definition last week, we’ve just added translations in Spanish and Catalan - thanks to Ignasi Labastida i Juan of CC Spain and CC Catalonia.
Once again - if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.
Polish Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
February 29th, 2008
We’re on a bit of a roll with translations of the Open Knowledge Definition! We’ve now got a Polish translation thanks to Jarosław Lipszyc.
Again - if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.
Danish Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
February 28th, 2008
We’ve now added a Danish translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) to opendefinition.org - thanks to Peter Froberg.
We look foward to adding more translations in the near future. If you would like to help out translating the Definition into another language - please don’t hesitate to get in touch on our discuss list.
Open Definition Advisory Council launched
February 15th, 2008
We are pleased to announce the launch of an Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Council will be formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the Open Definition site - including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Service Definition. As many of you will know, these definitions aim to provide clear and succinct sets of conditions for ‘openness’ in knowledge and services.
Jordan Hatcher of opencontentlawyer.com has kindly agreed to be Chair of the Council, which includes:
- Paul Jacobson, iCommons
- Paul Miller, Talis
- Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University
- Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation & Cambridge University
- Rob Styles, Talis
- Peter Suber, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & Earlham College
- Luis Villa, Columbia Law School, GNOME Foundation & Open Source Initiative
- Jo Walsh, Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation
- John Wilbanks, Science Commons
More detailed biographies are available on the Advisory Council page.
It is our intention that the overall development of the material on the site will continue in the same community based and collaborative manner. The Council’s role will be to provide oversight, guidance and input into this process, not to replace it.
This is fantastic news for the definitions projects!
CKAN 0.5 Released
February 1st, 2008
The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) version 0.5 has just been released.
Changes include:
- feature to list and search tags
- feature to make data available in machine-usable form via sql dump
- feature to purge a revision and associated changes
- support for reserved html characters in urls
- upgrade to Pylons 0.9.6
- new spam management utilities including (partial) blacklist support
The CKAN code is available from:
The data is available from:
We’ve currently got 135 packages. If you come across a large dataset or substantial collection, please consider registering it on CKAN!
The IPCC Data Distribution Centre - environmental data licensing
November 20th, 2007
We’ve recently started looking into how much environmental data made available on the web is open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a Data Distribution Centre (DDC) - which is a good start to see what data is available. The DDC “offers access to baseline and scenario data for representing the evolution of climatic, socio-economic, and other environmental conditions”. Many datasets from research centres around the world are available from the centre.
The “Why does the DDC exist?” page states:
Data are being provided by the DDC over the World Wide Web. All research groups supplying datasets have agreed to these being in the public domain. The data are provided free of charge, but all users are requested to register to ensure both that the data are used for public scientific research rather than for commercial applications and also that they can be informed of possible modifications, additions and other new developments at the DDC.
It is unfortunate that the Centre is restricting commerical re-use of the datasets they provide - especially given that many important environmental datasets are produced by US government research groups and are effectively open.
Some datasets have more specific licensing information or terms of use, such as the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios 4th Asessment Report (SRES-AR4) Global Climate Model data page, which states:
These data are licensed for use in Research Projects only. A ‘Research Project’ is any project organised by a university, a scientific institute, or similar organisation (private or public), for non-commercial research purposes only. A necessary condition of the recognition of non-commercial purposes is that all the results obtained are openly available at delivery costs only, without any delay linked to commercial objectives, and that the research itself is submitted for open publication.
It would be great if more data producers and distributors had clearer metadata about the licensing and terms of use of their datasets! This would allow a more fine-grained approach to re-use, as opposed to the blanket approach of the IPCC DDC, and several other environmental dataset distributors.
(As an aside: we’ve started an Open Environmental Data wiki page and we’d warmly welcome any contributions to this!)
Public Domain Works + The Open Library
October 17th, 2007
As some of you will know, Public Domain Works, a joint initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Free Culture UK and the Open Rights Group, had its alpha launch back in August. The Public Domain Works Database is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. Since the project was first publicly announced in June 2006, the PDW team have been busy mining through data kindly donated by Phillip Harper and the BBC Archives and building a web interface for it.
After an initial plan to partner with a project called WikiBiblio, Jon Phillips of Creative Commons announced that WikiBiblio was going to merge with the Open Library (whom we’ve blogged about before). He also suggested that Public Domain Works becomes a partner - which is currently being arranged.
The plan looks to be to upload the Public Domain Works data to the Open Library, and to use read/write APIs to continue to develop different front-ends for different jurisdictions - each with its own algorithms to determine which works are in the public domain.
The Open Library will be an invaluable resource for open metadata about works in the public domain if all goes to plan!
KForge v0.14 Released
September 21st, 2007
Another release of KForge is out (mainly bugfixes and minor feature enhancements). Changes include:
- Ensuring admin pages at /admin/ and not just /admin/model/.
- Setting zip_safe to False in setup.py to avoid problems with apache/modpython.
- Bringing the guide completely up to date.
- Ensuring access control works with Apache 2.0 and not just 2.2.
- Alphabetical sorting of projects and persons.
- Removing redundant variables from configuration file.
- Updating docstrings for plugins to include full installation instructions.
Full details in the release announce on the KForge project website.
KForge v0.13 Released
August 15th, 2007
After another six months of work we’ve released a new version of the KForge software. KForge/KnowledgeForge is one the OKF’s main activities with the KForge software being used to run the KnowledgeForge service. Over two and half years after work first started the project is now fairly mature with a growing number of projects hosted on KnowledgeForge as well as a substantial number of ‘outside’ users. Given the stability of the codebase and the service we’ll be looking to go “1.0″ in the near future.
The 0.13 release of KForge provides several new features and bugfixes including support for installing KForge on a single virtual host. Full details are in this post on the KForge project website.
